Enclosure, Coomdeeween, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Coomdeeween, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing hillslope above the Carhan River valley in south-west Kerry, a circular enclosure sits half-swallowed by bog, its boundary reduced to a low earthen bank from which large slabs and boulder-type stones still protrude at irregular intervals.

The enclosure is modest in scale, roughly fifteen metres across, with the bank itself barely twenty centimetres high in places and just over a metre wide. Yet what makes the spot quietly remarkable is not the enclosure alone but its company: within fifty metres, two other prehistoric features survive in the same boggy ground, each belonging to a different category of ancient activity.

About twenty metres to the north lies a fulacht fia, a type of site found in considerable numbers across Ireland and generally associated with Bronze Age cooking, though theories about their use have widened over the years to include bathing, brewing, and textile processing. They typically consist of a trough, often timber-lined or stone-lined, and a mound of fire-cracked stones that accumulated as heated rocks were used to boil water. Roughly fifty metres to the east, an unclassified megalithic tomb adds a further layer of prehistory to the hillside. Megalithic tombs, built from large upright stones and capstones, were used for burial and ritual across a broad span of the Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age; this particular example remains unclassified, meaning it does not fit neatly into the established categories of court tomb, portal tomb, passage tomb, or wedge tomb. Together, the three features suggest a hillslope that saw sustained human use across a long stretch of prehistory, though the precise relationship between them is unknown.

The enclosure itself sits in moor-grass-covered grazing on bog, which means the ground underfoot is likely soft and uneven. The stones protruding from the bank are concentrated along the south-west to south-east arc, while elsewhere only occasional traces of the bank remain visible, gradually merging back into the landscape.

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Pete F
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